Cold, dry and bright days are my favourite kind: no sweat, no rain, and everything outside looks glorious. We were lucky enough to have had such a day last week so, naturellement, we had to ruin it by carrying a screaming cat through the park and paying £124 to be told that there’s nothing wrong with him.
(Well, that sum of money was for a combination of the consultation, the steroid shot and the ruinously-expensive-but-joyously-infrequent flea, tick and double-arse-worm treatment. We didn’t pay the whole thing just for the advice, but you get what I mean, non?)
On the way there, we saw a pretty tabby cat sitting on the roof of a neighbouring house. And, when we returned, we saw that she was still there:
My stupid brain thought that the sun was casting a shadow next to her but, in actual fact, she was deep in telepathic communication with a tuxedo comrade:
Putting the world to rights. THEIR world. Not ours.“Don’t forget, as soon as the clock hits 3am … PARKOUR!”
When I shared the photo on my family’s WhatsApp group chat, my sister said, “Is that house in [name of street]?”
Me: “Yes, that’s right. How did you know?”
Her: “When we visited for Christmas, we walked past that same house and there were FOUR cats on that roof.”
Oh. Mon. Dieu.
Have we found the epicentre of The Mothership’s mysterious workings? Or are there many similar places around the world where her feline minions gather to telepathise? Please let me know if there has been any similarly suspicious feline activity in your neighbourhood.
Cat Daddy and I can’t abide food waste. So it really hurts us to be throwing away perfectly edible Orijen – especially as it’s more expensive than cocaine and gold combined – just because a certain little shit doesn’t like the way we’ve served it.
One of the benefits of Louis Catorze was that he didn’t have set mealtimes. So not only were we able to give him food if we were going out, knowing that he would happily eat it later when he was hungry, but we could tell chat-sitteurs to feed him when it suited them, not upon his command. However, if you’re having to pour boiling water onto his food, he doesn’t like it if it’s been left to soak in for ages. Once the food has absorbed too much water and gone soggy, he’s not interested.
The obvious answer to this would be to feed him only when he looks hungry. I thought this was a pretty foolproof method when it came to minimising waste: just wait until he’s circling his plate like a hungry saltwater crocodile and screaming bloody murder, right? Well, so I thought … until he looked at my labour-intensive offering, sniffed it, walked away and went outside.
He’d just been screaming for me to hurry up, SECONDS BEFOREHAND.
Cat Daddy noticed the same thing, and wondered whether Catorze just liked to know before going out that there would be food there when he returned. I can’t imagine how any animal would have evolved to think this – after all, leaving food unattended in the wild would mean some impinger taking advantage, non?
So now we can’t feed him if he’s not asking for food, nor can we feed him if he IS asking for food.
We don’t understand this animal. Someone, please, help us out here.
Weird little beast with Photoshop-effect alien eyes.
This is the current status for each of us here at Le Château:
Me: boiling a kettle in order to serve 0.3ml of boiling water to a cat.
Cat Daddy: shouting at me for boiling a kettle for such a minuscule amount of water when there’s a global energy crisis.*
Louis Catorze: enjoying his life of hot meals and chubbing up nicely, merci for asking.
*It’s not great, but it’s better than running the hot tap for ages until it reaches the required temperature, non? And I make a cup of tea for myself from the same kettle of water, so as not to be wasteful. Yes, that’s right: even if I don’t really want a cup of tea at that moment, I have one anyway just to be able to tell myself that I haven’t put the kettle on just for my cat.
Feeding Catorze is now quite the Herculean labour. Sometimes he sits by his plate, waiting patiently. At other times, he circles me like a hungry saltwater crocodile, screaming and screaming. And, of course, sometimes the pellets soak up too much water for Sa Maj’s liking, so we have to throw them away. But the little sod is eating, so we have, at least, achieved our objective.
However, we can’t help wondering what on earth made him decide to stop eating normally in the first place.
Are his teeth giving him trouble again?**
Did he want hot food because it’s cold outside (and, if so, how did he know that going on hunger strike would do the trick)?
Is he losing his sense of smell in his old age and finding that cold food just doesn’t have much scent-appeal, whereas hot food smells like a fine dining tasting menu?
Is it an evolutionary thing, whereby hot food more closely resembles a freshly-killed mouse or rat (eurgh)?
Was he bored of his food?
Or did he just think, “I wonder what the pathetic humans will do if I starve myself?”?
I shall await your suggestions as to which option might be correct …
**UPDATE: a trip to the vet has confirmed that there is nothing wrong with his teeth.
Louis Catorze’s Broadline has been discontinued. It’s always stressful when this kind of thing happens because, when it comes to complicated cats like him, it’s not quite as simple as just replacing the discontinued item with something else.
It’s already happened with his food, and with his bowl (well, ok, that wasn’t discontinued – I broke it), and what a saga it was each time. You’d think that, if a cat were hungry enough, they’d just eat. Nope. And you’d also think that, once they’d decided on their favourite food, they’d eat it from whatever serving vessel were provided. Also nope.
Luckily there isn’t the option of accepting or not accepting a spot-on – the little sod has no choice – but I was all ready for a quest through every spot-on treatment in existence, with each one either burning holes in him, making his fur fall out, turning him into some hideous, mutated FrankenRoi or some other catastrophic eventuality that hadn’t yet occurred to me.
The other factor is that Broadline treated both fleas and worms, so it’s imperative that any new treatment does the same, or better. Since Catorze is utterly unpillable and can even make pills disappear at will, it’s absolutely out of the question that I give him both a spot-on AND Greco a worming pill into him.
By some miracle, the vet was able to recommend the perfect solution. Not only does it treat fleas, ticks and TWO types of arse-worm (although I could have done without finding out that there are two types of arse-worm), and not only is it a spot-on liquid and not a tablet, but it only needs to be applied once every three months. Once. Every. Three. Months.
Naturellement there’s a catch: it’s excruciatingly expensive. But, for a treatment that is used so infrequently, no amount of money is too much. And, by the time Cat Daddy finds out the price, I will already have emailed the vet back and begged them to just take my money.
All we need now is for Catorze to take to it, without any drama or unexpected twists. Ahem.
Our under-floor heating has malfunctioned again, right in the middle of our cold snap. This meant another visit from Chris the heating engineer, which was good news for Louis Catorze as he loves men. Family members, friends, delivery drivers, tradesmen, random passers-by, trick-or-treating youths … Catorze will happily accept cuddles from any or all of the above.
Aww, how cute and uncreepy.
When Chris arrived, Catorze was outside on Rodent Duty. However, when he realised that there was a new man in his Château, he raced in, screaming.
Catorze: “Mwah! Mwah! Mwahhhhh!”
Me: “Oh. Erm, sorry about our cat. He loves it when visitors come, especially men.”
Chris: “Really? It’s usually the opposite with cats. They run away from me.”
Catorze: “‘MWAHHHHH!”
Chris then took an infra-red gadget from his bag – the same kind of gadget that they use on ghost-hunting programmes to detect temperature changes – and paced around the kitchen with it facing down towards the floor. He then said, “Look at the cat!” and pointed it at Catorze, who was sitting and creepy-staring at him.
I swear to Goddess: Catorze’s body on the screen was deep teal blue, as stone-cold as the floor around him, with heat radiating just from his red eyes.
Me: “Why isn’t he hot all over? Why is the heat just in that one place?”
Chris: “Strange. It’s just his eyes, isn’t it?”
Me: “…”
Him: “…”
Catorze: “Mwah!”
Chris left quite quickly after that.
I wish I’d taken a photo of what the gadget was showing us. That said, you have all known for years that Sa Maj is not of this world, non?
Louis Catorze hasn’t been eating much lately. We had initially put this down the fact that he does nothing all day but, one morning, I came downstairs to feed him and his bowl wasn’t empty. In fact, it was three-quarters full and, judging from what Cat Daddy later said about how much food he’d given him before bed, the little sod hadn’t touched it all night. I then wondered if something could be wrong.
He doesn’t look as if anything is wrong: he’s perfectly wide-eyed, energetic and vocal. But he’s a huge liar and con artist, so we couldn’t trust him as far as we could spit.
Psycho kitty.
On that particular occasion, I emptied away his old food and gave him a new serving. He sniffed it, then looked at me and let out a disappointed whine, as if to say, “And what do you call THIS shit?” Then, when I poured a spoonful of boiling water over half of the food, he guzzled down the lot, with audible “Nyom nyom nyom” sounds.
The last time around, it was because his teeth were troubling him. This time, because he ate the dry pieces of Orijen as well as the watered ones, and because he hasn’t been eating messily, which is usually a sign of tooth bother, I’m inclined to think he’s just taking the piss. Not that it makes any difference because, even if this is the case, Catorze is SUCH a massive sod that he will starve himself before eating less-than-perfect food (or perfect food served in a less-than-perfect fashion).
At least he’s eating. And, thanks to one of his lovely pilgrims, he has his own antique Louis XIV silver spoon with which I can measure out the boiling water. But what a pain in the arse.
UPDATE: a couple of hours after guzzling his first breakfast, this is what Catorze did:
1. Requested a second breakfast.
2. Five minutes of parkour around the house, skidding on the floorboards like Bambi on ice (younger followers: ask your parents).
3. Escaped out at The Front.
4. Screamed bloody murder at the window for me to let him in, startling a dog walker in the park.
Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?
Whilst I can’t claim to see inside Louis Catorze’s mind, I’m fairly certain he can’t fathom the future. And, since he has the memory of a swatted gnat, I don’t suppose he reflects much on the past, either. The little sod is very much focused on what’s happening in the present. And, right now, he is doing what he does every morning: snoozing on my lap whilst I sip a cup of tea.
This is what we do every morning, before the world wakes up. I make the most of this time because, once Cat Daddy is up, it’ll be all about him and Catorze will drop me like a hot stone.
I like to think that Catorze enjoys this time, too. If, like now, we’re going through a cold snap*, sometimes he warms his tail on my cup of tea, like this:
Oolong tea is an excellent tail-warmer.
*Non-Brits: a cold snap in the UK means 1°C lower than it was the day before.
Starting every day like this doesn’t necessarily guarantee good things to follow, but it’s certainly the best start anyone could hope for. And, when I go to bed, I think about the future: specifically the next morning, and being able to do this all over again.
Louis Catorze has barely budged from the living room recently. Every time we wonder whether he’s ill, we check on him and see that he’s perfectly fine. Then it dawned on Cat Daddy that his poor boy is probably taking refuge from the dreaded guitar.
Yes, Cat Daddy is still practising for several hours a day in the kitchen. And, yes, Catorze is still hating it with every grain of his being.
I came home from work the other night and was greeted by an incensed Catorze. The reason for his outrage? The cleaner was vacuuming, and Cat Daddy was playing the guitar. Yes, his two least favourite things in the world, in his Château, AT THE SAME TIME.
The little sod followed me upstairs and circled me as I changed my clothes, screaming absolute bloody murder. The only way of calming him down was to cuddle him on the bed and do his favourite thing: squeeze and rub his belly flesh quite firmly (sounds cruel but, trust me, he loves this).
By early evening I thought he would have recovered from his double-trauma. However, although he wasn’t angry anymore, he was alternating between creepy-staring and whimpering like a needy child, and I’m ashamed to say that I buckled under the pressure of his sinister intimidation-guilt combo. I took down the tree decorations with one hand whilst cradling Catorze over my shoulder, like a baby, with the other. It was just as absurd as it sounds and 986 times more difficult; unwinding lights from a tree whose Blood-Letting Needles of Death slash you with every movement is quite the Herculean labour even with two hands, let alone with one.
Anyway, our house is clean, the living room deYuled and Catorze back where he belongs, in his happy place. Cat Daddy, however, has a dead arm after having to watch television like this, which is a whole new way of being TUC:
Cat Daddy, don’t move a muscle!
Catorze loves his papa. But he still wishes he would stop playing the guitar.
A world without spiders would be utter bliss. Yeah, yeah, I know that they eat flies, and so they’re doing us a favour. Whatever.
I used to think I was very lucky to live in a relatively spider-free house; in the eight years that we’ve lived here, I have only seen about four, of which just one was of the Category A variety (don’t ask). However, I have since found out that Cat Daddy has been quietly removing them whenever he finds them. Sometimes he has even disposed of them from the very room that I’ve been in and, because he has done this so discreetly, I have never noticed.
Louis Catorze is spectacularly poor with spiders: he will bound across the room to eat a spider minding its own business on a faraway wall, yet he just stares right past hand-sized ones coming at me wearing a hockey masks and carrying chain saws. So I was deeply envious when my sister told me that Otis and Roux had met their first spider (of which we are aware, at least) and were desperate to attack it.
This is great, right?
Well. Ahem. Unfortunately such was their Urge To Kill that they fought over which of them should be the one to deliver the killer blow and send the beast to the great web in the sky. And, in the meantime, the spider did a runner. This is exactly the opposite of what is wanted; I’d far rather not know that there was a spider, than know that there was one but my arachno-useless cats had let it get away.
Here are Otis and Roux, mid-dispute:
“To me, to you …”
And here is Catorze, photographed during a spider-training session in which I used reverse psychology as a tool:
(It didn’t work.)
UPDATE: Otis eventually won the stand-off and was able to successfully retrieve and terminate the spider. And, to celebrate his kill, he slept right in the middle of Niece 1’s bed, forcing her to set up camp on the floor and sleep there ALL NIGHT. Clearly he has her well-trained already.
It’s 2024. And, if you’re a believer in starting the New Year in the way in which you intend to go on, I’m not sure what you will make of the fact that my first task of the year was cleaning up three* piles of cat puke. Because one of them was the same colour as the floorboards, and because I was wearing thick socks, I didn’t notice it until I had dragged it across the hallway and back again.
*If you’re one of the friends to whom I reported TWO piles of puke, that’s because the third was in a different location, waiting to be discovered like a newborn volcanic island (and about the size of one, too). And, naturellement, I found it right after I’d put away the cleaning products and washed my hands from the first two piles.
Cat Daddy thinks it’s the beginning of the end for Catorze, although he’s been saying this for the last three years. It’s true that, sometimes, he looks thin, scruffy and old (Catorze, I mean, not Cat Daddy); when he lifts his head after a long sleep and his fur is all splayed and haphazard, he could be a feline version of Father Jack from Father Ted (younger followers: ask your parents). Yet he’s otherwise wide-eyed and plushy-furred, and he still has the energy and the inclination to do this (whatever this might be – we still don’t know):
The invisible impinger MUST DIE.
So, whilst I’ll mention the puking to the vet when we next go in, I’m in no hurry to rush him in right now.
In four months’ time, the little sod will be fourteen, and there is something wonderfully magical about Catorze turning quatorze. We can’t wait to see what this year will bring him.
Happy New Year to you all, and thank you for supporting Catorze and us.
If you started a sports team, what would the colours and mascot be?
Louis Catorze already supports a football team – Sunderland – whose nickname is The Black Cats and whose mascots are, erm, black cats. You can’t get much better than that. However, their online shop sells dog collars but not cat ones, which is either a massive oversight or a sign that cats won’t be bossed by anyone:
Où sont les chats?
Sunderland traditionally play in red and white, but Catorze doesn’t care about colours; he’s just grateful that football compels spectating men to sit down and watch television, because this guarantees him some comfortable male laps for at least ninety minutes.
Male laps, you say? Sa Maj is all ears.
However, if he were to start a football team consisting of just cats, he would have Olly the British Blue as his number one keeper and Boots, usurper stepbrother of his frère-from-another-mère, Antoine, as his first choice centre-half. Have a look here to see how Olly’s Cat Daddy – also a goalkeeper – trained him.
As for Boots, his solid stature and zero-tolerance approach to impingers would make him an ideal blocker, although he’s a versatile player and can attack as well as defend.
He’s now lost five of his six Chelsea collars, so maybe blue ISN’T the colour?The Reds can’t get past this rock-solid defence.
Managers aren’t allowed on the pitch during matches, but Catorze, who practically INVENTED doing the opposite of what people expect or want, wouldn’t be able to help himself. And we imagine he would look just like this cat, whose flatlining ears indicate that he wasn’t too impressed with this particular performance:
Picture from foxsports.com.au.
Is your cat a potential sportsperson? If so, what would they do/play?
(This is terrible English but I’m just going to go with it.)
The good thing about being a king is that, if you don’t want to do something, you can always ask one of your underlings to do it for you.
These days, it’s far too cold to be sitting outside on Rodent Duty. It’s great fun during the summer months, but it loses its appeal during the winter. So how marvellous it is to have a bank of replacements on whom one can rely.
Cat Daddy spotted this fine feline outside, appearing to assume Louis Catorze’s favourite position for Rodent Duty:
And you are …?
We have never seen this cat before. And I would be prepared to bet Le Château on us never seeing him/her again.
Where does Catorze store this secret army? And will he be summoning its soldiers to fight alongside him when The Uprising is upon us?
We hope you’ve had a lovely few days. Louis Catorze spent much of Christmas Day asleep, waking only to eat and to thrash around in the discarded wrapping paper. We treated him to some Parma ham fat and, after the first piece, the cheeky sod let out an AUDIBLE SCOWL because I wasn’t quick enough delivering the second.
My sister, mamma of Otis and Roux, called me for some cat flap advice a couple of days ago. Louis Catorze took around five months to learn to go out through the cat flap, and another couple of weeks to learn to come in again, so I don’t know whether this makes me the best person to advise (if the thickest cat in the world can learn, anyone can) or the absolute worst (clearly my training methods were shite).
After completing their period of house arrest, Otis and Roux were ready to be turned loose into the great wide world outside. However, the cats couldn’t figure out that the flap would open if they pushed against it. The humans tried to give them an encouraging shove to send them on their way, but they weren’t having it.
Training Catorze was excruciating. Like Otis and Roux, he didn’t seem to want to push with his head, either. Instead, he chose to go outside via a long and convoluted route out of the bathroom window, across next door’s conservatory, along next door’s side fence, across their back fence, back along our fence, onto the barbecue and then down onto the ground.
Catorze would often burst back in through the bathroom window, clattering the wooden Venetian blind and scaring us. And, sometimes, our bathroom products would, erm, travel with him. We once lost our shower gel and shampoo, then later found them on next door’s conservatory roof. Another time, we heard a crash followed by steady, rhythmic knocking. When we scraped up the courage to investigate, we found that, during the Catorzian scramble indoors, he had somehow caught a bottle of mouthwash in the slats of the blind and it was knocking on the window as it swung. Even if I spent the rest of my life trying, I’m sure I could never hang a bottle of mouthwash in a Venetian blind like that.
I told my sister to tape the cat flap open, gradually reducing the opening over time. When I’d tried to do this with Catorze, although it (eventually) achieved the desired result, the cat flap didn’t like being taped, so we propped it open with sticks of ever-decreasing length. Obviously, when Catorze or whichever random neighbourhood impinger came through, their arse would dislodge the stick, slamming the flap shut and trapping Catorze inside or outside (depending on who it was that had come in). So someone* would have to keep retrieving the stick and restarting the whole process.
*Me.
Otis and Roux came and went happily, all day, through the taped-open cat flap. When night fell, the humans didn’t want Foxy Loxy or Mr Badger creeping in so, once the cats were in, the cat flap was locked. And that was when the cats decided to start pushing with their heads.
The next day, Roux was the first to successfully push with her head and go out and in, soon followed by her brother. And that was it: training complete.
Otis is exploring his kingdom.
Part of me was glad that my sister only had short-lived stress, worrying about the cats running away or getting stuck in the cat flap tunnel. And part of me was jealous as hell for the way that Catorze had had me messing about with flap-propping sticks, covering the cat flap with opaque paper (in case the transparent force-field was upsetting Catorze), spraying the cat flap with catnip to encourage him to push, chasing out interlopers who wandered in and whatever other desperate measures I took.
All is now well with the world, although Catorze is mildly disappointed that his cat-cousins didn’t drag out the circus for a little longer. Where’s the fun in making it easy for the humans?
Le Roi would have preferred more drama, but tant pis.
louiscatorze.com 